Blonde: position vacant

Meg has moved on, and Hollywood is on the hunt for a new comedy sweetheart, writes Phillip McCarthy.

Things certainly have changed for Meg Ryan who, for much of her career, was dubbed America's Sweetheart. She reigned for 15 years or more as the queen of the romantic comedy but in her latest film she can't get a date.

Not that she seems to be looking for one. The film, Against The Ropes, is no bubbly love fest, even if sparks do fly between two other characters. It's a sort of Erin Brockovich goes ringside, the dramatisation of the life and times of Jackie Kallen who, in the 1980s, stepped on toes in the testosterone-fuelled world of American boxing by managing her own fighters.

As in Erin Brockovich, which snagged Julia Roberts an Oscar in 2000, Ryan's Kallen is a brassy woman given to short skirts, low-cut tops and hard-edged retorts. This is definitely not Annie from Sleepless In Seattle, Sally from When Harry Met Sally or Kathleen from You've Got Mail.

In a way it marks Ryan's further drift from the perky, loveable and blonde style of character she pretty much made her own. But Ryan is 44 this year and, starting with last year's psycho-sexual drama In The Cut, she pretty much signalled that she thinks it's time to stop being quite so adorable.

"You know, romantic comedies are the ones that people see or that make money and that's great," she said. "And like In The Cut, this film [Against The Ropes] is very different from the sort of films that people seem to associate me with. But I'm an actor, I like to do different things. I thought it would be really fun. I was curious about the kind of arc of this character. In a way it's an extreme character and that was fun for me."

In fact, Ryan's Kallen seems anything but pleased when her prize fighter, played by Omar Epps, has a liaison with one of her friends. And it's not that she's jealous. She's just worried that a romance will distract him from his gruelling training regimen. It's an attitude that fits Ryan's real-life demeanour since her break-up with Dennis Quaid in 2001 after a decade of marriage: the media onslaught was intense enough to make her wary about discussing her love life since.

Kallen was the first real-life character that Ryan has taken on since she played the girlfriend of Jim Morrison in The Doors in 1991. And it's not her last. In Ryan's next film, Papa, she plays the fourth and last wife of writer Ernest Hemingway. And it's a pretty safe bet that the film, set in 1959, won't be either romantic or a comedy. Hemingway was no upbeat Tom Hanks or witty Billy Crystal: he was a depressive, who ended up killing himself.

So who is going to inherit Ryan's Hollywood sweetheart mantle? Does anyone actually want it? As Ryan pointed out, romantic comedies weren't her only films. But with her particular brand of blonde sassiness, they were the ones she made her own. And while any number of actresses are dipping into the genre - even dark-haired Jennifer Garner, best known for her kick-arse TV role on Alias, has one called Suddenly 30 - there are probably two main contenders right now.

Kate Hudson, 25, has churned out a string of them in the past two years including Raising Helen, Le Divorce, Alex And Emma and How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. However, along with every other young actress, she's not about to admit to coveting Ryan's vacated title.

"Doing films like this is fun," she said recently about Raising Helen. "But I do other types of film as well." Indeed she does but she is the daughter of Goldie Hawn, who in another era was Hollywood's preferred adorable blonde.

Another leading contender is 29-year-old Drew Barrymore, who has dipped into the romantic comedy genre consistently during her adult career with films such as The Wedding Singer, Never Been Kissed, Duplex and 50 First Dates. As with Hudson, she has played down the blonde perkiness thing that makes her attractive to a male audience and non-intimidating to female ones. Like Ryan she has had a high-profile marital break-up, from actor Tom Green, but she had the good sense to get it over with early.

It's pretty clear that everyone's favourite diminutive blonde, Reese Witherspoon, 28, is not actively seeking sweetheart status. But, being effervescent and cute, she would probably walk away with it if she stuck to movies such as Legally Blonde, Sweet Home Alabama, Election and Cruel Intentions. But, of course, she doesn't. She's now filming Walk The Line, a Johnny Cash biopic in which she plays severely brunette June Carter Cash, and she's doing the Thackeray novel, Vanity Fair, after that.

Still, one of Witherspoon's coming projects is a romantic comedy called Sports Widow, in which she plays a young wife who becomes so frustrated at her husband's obsession with watching sports on television that she becomes a sports expert to one-up him. Sounds perky and adorable to us.